


Across the border

by jspringsteen



Category: Sicario (2015), Sicario (Movies), Sicario 2 (2018), Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)
Genre: F/M, Ghosts, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 19:49:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15274941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jspringsteen/pseuds/jspringsteen
Summary: In the desert, there are no barriers except those men have created, with wire, stone, guns and dogs. It’s a land populated by the living dead, the already dead, and he has walked among them for so long that he feels right at home. But now he wonders if it is his home after all.





	Across the border

He feels her, but it’s too dark to see anything. Yet another sleepless night, lying in bed in the place he calls home (for lack of a better word), and he suddenly hears her voice, as clear as if she were lying next to him. A flap of the otherwise immobile curtain, a flickering of the streetlight outside. He knows. She’s here.

Every night he dreams he is lying on the floor of the desert, drifting in and out of consciousness, until the sun begins beating down on him and the sweat begins to trickle down his blood-caked face. He feels the drops slide down, remembers felt the cold steel of the barrel against his temple, then the white-hot bullet passing through the skin of his face. Come morning, he feels exhausted, as if he has spent the whole night climbing out of a grave.

For the best part of his life he barely so much as flinched whenever somebody pointed a gun at him; these are dog-eat-dog times, and his appetite is voracious. Finding Cynthia and Juanita in a pool of blood in the kitchen had brought him into a state of fantastic numbness, where he could experience how it felt to be invincible, dead enough to not have to deal with all the petty vicissitudes of daily life but somehow still living. What can bullets do to someone who is already dead? he’d asked, silently, when he stood there in the parking lot, looking at Kate on her balcony with a gun in her hands. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of… etcetera, etcetera. The world was a valley. There was no escaping the shadow. He thought he’d glimpsed a pinprick of sunlight during the days after killing Alarcón. But then again, maybe it was just the light of a train in the distance.

“Kidnapping a little girl, Alejandro?” She uses his name in a way that Matt and the others who treat him like the ghost he is never do. It sounds like a relic to him, once worth something but traded in long ago for easier, more common currency – _sicario._ Only she pronounces it like it still contains the value of his person.

“I’m not surprised. After all, you’ve killed children before.” She sits at the foot of his bed; he imagines he feels the pressure there. She is the voice of his conscience, another thing he can no longer escape now. He has killed children. He remembers how good it felt to exact vengeance on his own terms, minimizing the collateral damage. Except, of course, for Kate. He saw those two words in neon letters above her head the day he met her.

“What was she, another stand-in for your dead daughter? Like I once was?”

“If you had children, you would understand,” he says, his voice muffled by his pillow. “You don’t ever forget something like that happening to your own. You’d understand what the desire for vengeance feels like.”

“But why drag us into it?” She gets to her feet; he imagines her crossing her arms in that determined way she has. “Why take that little girl, and me, and God knows who else, just so you can live out this fantasy of being daddy again, of protecting—”

A flame of anger, oily and red-hot, rears up in his chest. “You don’t understand. Matt—”

“Oh, I understand Matt, all right.” She paces up and down at the foot of his bed. “You’re Matt’s lapdog, aren’t you? And every once in a while he lets you off the leash, and the freedom is so unfamiliar you don’t know what to do with it, and you ruin lives, _that’s_ what you do, you ruin people’s lives, like you ruined mine—”

“Not much of a life,” he spits back. “You were divorced.” If he lifts his chin he can see her, he knows, but he keeps his eyes focused on the ceiling, listening instead for that tremor of emotion in her voice. He remembers hearing of her divorce before even meeting her, ready to dismiss her for letting herself commit the biggest taboo on the barometer of the human experience.

“Oh, so being divorced makes me worthless? Makes me trash?” she says, venomously. “I hardly thought you would be the type of person to judge someone for fucking up a marriage, of all things. You don’t get to decide, Alejandro, what makes some people’s lives worth more than others’.”

“Coming from an FBI agent?” He rolls over on his side, staring into the darkness. “Did you really think _you_ were saving lives rather than ruining them?”

“I did,” she says, and he believes her. Her training may have drilled into her the ability to forget and dispense information as she sees fit, but lying is not in her nature.

“And now… I’m not scarred, like you, but I carry you around like a glass splinter.” He imagines her patting down her slim torso, looking for the wound. “You got inside me, somehow.” She pauses. “I don’t know what that makes me.”

“It makes you dead,” he says, “or believe that you’re already dead. That no matter what you do, whatever hurt you inflict on someone else, it doesn’t matter, because nothing matters. You might as well kill, because you’re beyond being killed. Until—”

“Until what?” she says, and her voice comes from closer by. Alejandro tilts his head, studies the darkness where he thinks her eyes might be.

“Until you meet someone,” he says, keeping his gaze steady, “who reminds you of how it felt to be alive. Me, I died when my wife and daughter did. That’s how it felt. And killing Alarcón, and his children, felt like the first breath of air I’d taken in years.”

“You’re selfish,” she says. “Taking people’s lives to get your own back. It’s parasitic.”

“What would you do?” he asks, folding one arm under his cheek. “Knowing you’re already dead? Wouldn’t you kill those you don’t think of as human – or those who don’t think of _you_ as human – if you thought it would make you feel alive again?” He pauses, but she stays silent.

“How’s small-town life treating you, Kate? Do you feel ready to start shooting hillbillies yet?”

“It’s hell,” she admits. “All these people looking at me like I got no business walking among them. A woman, alone, childless, clearly going mad. If this was the previous century they’d stick me in a sanatorium.”

He nods. “So you know how it feels. To be disconnected. To feel you’re a ghost inhabiting the world of the living.”

“Or the only living person among the ghosts.” The hairs on his arm stand up; he feels the air moving, Kate getting closer. “You never feel as alive as after you’ve almost died, isn’t that true? After that guy…” she trails off, then recollects herself: “After I was almost murdered, I felt… so much. Emotions I thought didn’t know existed. And you—”

She doesn’t need to finish her sentence. He can see her now, her hair still wet from the shower and her eyes red from the crying she would not let him see she did in there, lifting a cigarette to her lips with shaking fingers but just holding it there, not even taking a drag before dropping her hand again. Her weak smile of gratitude. He doesn’t usually find smoking attractive in women, but with Kate, the cigarettes simply seemed extensions of her slender fingers, the smoke she breathed out as common as frosted air on a cold desert morning. She’d passed her training so he knew she was strong, had to be, but looking at her skinny arms, he always imagined he might grab them one day and snap them cleanly in two.

Watching Kate making out with the spy had unlocked something in him. Seeing her sink into the moment with reckless abandon, freed from the tension that seemed to run under her skin permanently, head lolling, gasping for breath, had made him more aroused than he’d felt in years. Even knowing that it was bound to go south at any moment, he'd drunk her in, her heavy eyelids, her eyes glazed over with passion rather than fatigue, her fingers fumbling with buttons rather than her packet of cigarettes, her hands linked around the guy’s shoulders rather than her gun. And him looking on as from behind glass, his hands manacled behind his back still, long after Cynthia’s death. Like the ghost he was.

He'd told her she reminded him of someone very special to him, and seen the confusion in her eyes. He used Juanita as the reason for saving Kate’s life, when really, just the fact that she reminded him of this forgotten feeling of connection with the living was enough. It was the same with Isabel.

She says, “You reminded me of how it felt to be alive,” thoughtfully, testing out the paradox of her feelings. It echoes his exact train of thought. He used to think he would stay in this business until his inevitable bloody death. But when he kept going, and eventually grew to be the biggest dog in the room – the one that everyone feared would be let loose – he began to think of every job as possibly the last one. The last one, before… but he could never finish the sentence. Before this. Before death. Before Kate.

“You’re no longer a ghost, Alejandro,” she says, and her voice is right next to his ear. His breath hitches to feel her so close, not touching except for the faint coolness of her breath on his cheek.

“All you do is create them. You’re gonna have to leave this life someday, one way or another. And when you do… they’ll come for you.”

He rolls on his back and rubs his face, passing over the new scars he has yet to grow accustomed to. Blood and sand had clotted together, making it impossible to heal cleanly and quickly, and the resulting lumps of scar tissue tell of his past like braille. Alejandro is not a vain man; he’s aware of his better-than-average looks, has even used them in the past to facilitate any deals where women were involved. The scars don’t bother him because they ruin his complexion. They bother him because they now define him. Bye bye ghost, hello Scarface. He is used to changing his skin whenever it suits him, but the wounds in his face have pinned him down in one place.

Kate’s ghost, meanwhile, has knelt down next to his bed, and he knows her hand is hovering over his. He feels paralyzed, feeling her close to him, unable to even turn his head.

“What did you do to me?” he mumbles, wanting to close the space, feeling his blood speak to her in his veins.

“You did this to yourself,” she says. Her fingertips edge closer until they touch his cheek, feather-light, and brush over the scar, come to rest on his chin.

“You got what you deserved,” she says, and her tone is sharp again. “You get one for every life you fuck up.”

He wants to grab her wrist, grind the bones together into powder the way he’s always imagined he someday would. But his hands seem impossibly heavy, too heavy to lift, so he lies there, quietly seething while her voice washes over him. Fuck her, he thinks, for playing the victim. Fuck her for making him want to fuck her. Fuck her for making him give into his own weakness and stepping in to rescue her. She should have got what she deserved, he thinks, for being stupid enough to let herself get lured into a trap.

But then, even the elusive _sicario_ had let himself get trapped. The foolish choices one makes when one feels alive.

Kate’s hand has come to rest on his chest and her face leans against his pillow. If he could turn his head, he thinks he’d just be able to make out her pale skin in the darkness.

“You wanted to protect me.” It’s not a question. He feels his anger drain away, replaced by that curious combination of arousal, pity, and sympathy she has stirred up in him from the beginning.

“Why?” She moves her head, leans in to him. Her lips brush the stubble on his cheek, and she moves on to his scar, kissing him softly on the puckered skin. He gasps, feeling himself grow hard under the sheets, but he doesn’t move. Her hand glides down to grasp his, lying feebly at his side. Alejandro sighs as she plants a dry kiss on his lips and lays her hand on his chest, sliding it down ever so slowly.

“How can you protect me when you’ve made me what I am?” His thoughts drift to the image of her back curving and coiling as she ground in the guy’s lap. She lightly traces her fingers over his pectorals, his nipples, and his hand twitches, itching to touch himself, to ease the tension building in his belly.

“Why did you rescue me from that asshole? Dying would have saved me a lot of trouble. Were you too busy enjoying the free peep show?”

“Kate…”

“You ruined my life.” Her hand stops at his navel and her face is suddenly far away, her voice like a glass about to shatter.

“You think you don’t mean anything to me?” he says, and it comes out as a whisper. Her hand burns on his stomach. “You think I just tossed a grenade into your life and blew you apart like it was nothing? You don’t think I caught some of those shards myself?”

“I wouldn’t know, _sicario._ ” But the ice is gone from her voice. “Knowing you, you were wearing bulletproof _everything._ ”

“Not true.”

She is close, but no longer touching him. He twists his head, staring into the darkness. If she’s right there or not, he still can’t tell.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you that night.” He searches, thinks he sees the gleam of her eyes. “The job—”

“Yeah, yeah, the job, Matt’s instructions, I know. He wanted to teach me a little lesson about exposing myself.” That’s the Kate he remembers, and he grins despite himself. “You’re too good at following orders, you know.”

He knows it’s true. Even if he pretended like he was letting him off the leash, the fact was that Matt had still held the leash in his hands. They say being addicted to smoking is fifty per cent the automatic motion of lifting something to your lips. Alejandro has never smoked, but he feels it with his gun, which he automatically reaches for and points even when he isn’t carrying it. Waits for his orders. Trained like a good little soldier.

She lays her head back against his pillow.

“You should stop running, Alejandro.”

He looks up at the ceiling again, at the unwavering shadow of the streetlight. He says,

“And let the ghosts come to get me?”

“You can protect yourself. You’re a man risen from the dead, for God’s sake. You’re a wolf.”

Wolves and sheep. As if the world could be divided up in those two categories, when even the dead weren’t really dead and the living weren’t really alive. The more he thinks about borders, the more he’s convinced they don’t exist. In the desert, there are no barriers except those men have created, with wire, stone, guns and dogs. It’s a land populated by the living dead, the already dead, and he has walked among them for so long that he feels right at home. But now he wonders if it is his home after all. If there isn’t some place in the world where he can escape their sullen, empty gaze and look into eyes that aren’t shifting constantly, looking away in fear of recognition, but with friendliness, affection, even. Kate was the first person to look at him like that after he’d saved her life, even if he could also see her growing confusion, unsure as she was of what to make of him, and finally the hurt and anger that have presumably sent her here tonight, poised on his bed like a Fury.

Kate is silent for a while. Alejandro feels his head spinning, and for one delirious second, he imagines what it feels like to live a normal life as a man who opens his mailbox and sees the name Alejandro Gillick on his bills, on the sign by the door, printed on the first page of the crime novel he’s written. Maybe he’ll go back to Puerto Rico. Far away from Mexico, from the borderland. A wolf among sheep. Would they accept him? More importantly, would she? Does he dare imagine a morning where he’ll wake up to the sunlight streaming in, in his own bed, with Kate next to him, curled up against his body and one skinny arm flung over his scarred torso? ( _One for every life you've fucked up._ )

He knows it was the boy who shot him. “Reminds me of you,” Matt had said, when he had been cleaned up and told him what had happened at the border. “Ruthless little motherfucker.” A year from now, he’ll look that boy up, and tell him everything he knows about being ruthless. About being already dead. About building a border between yourself and others, those who are not quite human, to make the killing easier. Matt will say the world needs another _sicario,_ and Alejandro will deliver, like he always does. And when he has…

He asks, “Would you come with me?”

Her reply is swift.

“Where?”

He thinks for a minute. “To the land of sheep,” he replies, with a wry smile.

“And where is that?”

“I’ll find out.”

She’s close to his ear, her breath warm and damp, and he feels her brush his earlobe when she says, “I’ll meet you across the border.”

The curtain flaps, the halo of light blinks like a sleepy eye. She’s gone.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been a fan of this pairing for a long time, but it wasn't until I saw the (frankly disappointing) sequel to Sicario that this idea popped into my head. A lot of fics tend to take Kate's POV, following the first movie, but I liked the insight we got into Alejandro's character in this one. Where does he go from here? Where does his allegiance lie?
> 
> After seeing the movie I listened to Bruce Springsteen's album Devils & Dust, which is one of my favourites. It showcases one man's efforts to look for the human in those we consider to be inhuman (refugees, minorities, collateral damage of capitalism and political upheavals) and for the inhuman in those we call our own, those we call human. I'm intrigued by the idea of breaking free from that structure and living on your own terms. I often end up writing ghost stories for that reason, because ghosts are free from these rules, and are able to go wherever they like. What I wrote was largely inspired by the sentiments in the songs Across the Border, Leah, and Further Up on the Road. 
> 
> Please comment if you enjoyed!


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